The present invention relates to delivery control systems for a printing press.
In the past, printing presses have been utilized to print a web in the press for newspapers, with the webs being cut and folded such that they are placed in the form of bundles near an output portion of the press. The bundles are placed in a plurality of trays which pass around a loop, and the bundles are ejected from the trays onto chutes in order to deliver the bundles to trucks which then take the bundles to remote locations where they are distributed to subscribers.
The process for delivering the bundles of newspapers to the trucks has been very limited in sophistication, since the distribution systems delivered bundles to routes for the trucks at rates which by definition are rates which are not to be exceeded. The distribution procedure for these prior systems was based upon skipping trays to ensure that the specified delivery rate is not exceeded. The distribution systems assumed that all the trays were full, and knowing the speed of the press and trays, as well as the injection rate from the trays, the systems performed calculations for delivering the bundles to the trucks. However, not all the trays were actually full, and some of the trays were empty.
As a result, the distribution systems of the newspaper bundles was very inefficient. Some of the trays with bundles may pass the injection point, and some of the trays may be selected for ejection which did not actually have bundles in the selected trays. Some groups of bundles may travel around on the trays several times before being delivered in these systems which are based on skipping trays, and these systems take relatively long periods of time to load even high priority routes, which is undesirable and inefficient in delivering the bundles from the press to the truck routes.